My IQ has been increasing year by year.

(Damn it, I clicked too fast again. I'll repost the first two chapters tomorrow. I can't change it now. I really want to die.)

On the third floor of the administration building of the Provincial Experimental High School, at the far east end, there is a small seminar room.

The standing air conditioner unit in the corner emitted a low hum, its blades swaying slowly up and down, evenly spreading cool air throughout the room. Outside the window, the sycamore leaves were slightly curled by the sun, and the chirping of cicadas drifted in through the double-glazed windows, reduced to a faint, indistinct noise. Inside and outside, it felt like two completely different seasons.

Six people were sitting in front of a long, rectangular mahogany conference table.

This year, the province selected the entire team to participate in the National Junior High School Mathematics Competition Finals.

On the left side of the table sat Chen Zhuo, Zhou Kai, and Lin Yi.

To the right of the table were three unfamiliar faces: two men and one woman.

(I made some minor changes to the beginning, otherwise, with all men, I felt like I was in a monastery.)

Those were top math students who came from several other key junior high schools in the province.

One of the boys was named Zhang Bai. He wore thick-rimmed glasses with a high prescription and had very short hair.

The other boy was named Li Nanbai, and he was slightly chubby.

The girl's name was Mo Xiaoyu. She had her hair tied in a ponytail, and the stray hairs in front of her forehead were held back with thin black hair clips.

In front of each of the three of them was a thick stack of blank draft paper.

On the table were pencils, black, blue, and red ballpoint pens, as well as a set of transparent plastic rulers and compasses.

opposite.

Zhou Kai took out a few sheets of draft paper from his schoolbag, aligned the edges, and weighed them down with his pencil case.

Lin Yi pulled out a chair and chose a spot directly below the air conditioner vent. She didn't take any draft paper; she only held a blue ballpoint pen in her hand. Leaning back in her chair, she half-opened her eyes and stared at the table. With a slight exertion of her fingers, she skillfully twirled the pen a few times, leaving a blue afterimage.

Chen Zhuo pulled out a chair and sat down.

His backpack was placed at his feet.

On the table, there was only a black mechanical pencil and a white eraser.

There was nothing else.

The door to the seminar room was pushed open.

Coach Xu, the team leader of the provincial team, walked in.

Coach Xu was in his forties, with a receding hairline. He was wearing a gray short-sleeved shirt and carrying a large stainless steel thermos. The lid of the thermos was half-open, revealing the green tea leaves that had been steeping inside.

Coach Xu walked to the end of the long table and put down his thermos.

Without saying any unnecessary words, he directly pulled out six exam papers from the file bag tucked under his arm.

"This morning, each person will receive one test paper for three hours to get a preliminary assessment."

Coach Xu divided the test papers into two groups and slid them across the table.

"No talking, no flipping through the book, hand it in when you're done."

The exam papers were passed to everyone.

The teaching and research office was very quiet, except for the scratching sound of pens on paper.

Time flies.

The final, most challenging problem on the back is a combination of spatial geometry and combinatorics.

The diagram is extremely complex, and the conditions given are very hidden.

Zhang Bai's brows furrowed instantly.

He picked up a ruler and a pencil and began to copy the complex geometric shape on the draft paper.

Solid lines, dashed lines, sketching little by little.

His brain was rapidly searching through the types of questions he had encountered before, trying to find the auxiliary line that could break the deadlock.

Li Nanbai and Mo Xiaoyu, who were standing next to them, were also lost in thought.

Mo Xiaoyu tapped her pen twice on the paper, then quickly wrote down line after line of derivation formulas. After writing half a page, she realized that the logic didn't work, so she crossed it out in frustration and started over.

The sounds of paper turning and pen nibs scratching on the table were amplified by the hum of the air conditioner.

Lin Yi looked at the intricate diagram in the last question of the test paper.

No drawings were made.

She stared at the graphic for about five or six minutes.

His gaze was somewhat unfocused, as if he were looking at something else through the paper.

Suddenly, she blinked.

I picked up the blue ballpoint pen and wrote down a core lemma directly in the largely blank answer area of ​​the exam paper.

There are no preliminary derivation steps.

Following this lemma, she derived the final result with just a few strokes of her pen.

After finishing writing, she threw down her pen, leaned back in her chair, and stared blankly at the leaves rustling in the wind outside the window.

Chen Zhuo, sitting next to Lin Yi, was holding a mechanical pencil.

My gaze fell on the final spatial geometry problem.

Chen Zhuo's pen tip landed on the exam paper.

He drew three mutually perpendicular lines, using a certain intersection point at the bottom of the figure as the origin.

X-axis, Y-axis, Z-axis.

He directly created a spatial rectangular coordinate system on the paper.

He then converted all the side lengths and angles given in the problem into coordinate points.

At this moment, he completely transformed the geometric problem into an algebraic problem.

There's no need to guess the question setter's intentions, nor is there any need to seek out some brilliant geometric intuition.

Chen Zhuo's pen moved smoothly across the paper.

Find the normal vector of the plane.

List the third-order determinant.

Matrix transformation.

His writing speed is not fast, but there is a breathtaking coherence in it.

Not a single formula is superfluous, and not a single pause is spent thinking about the next step.

The logic is flawless.

The lead of a mechanical pencil leaves even gray marks on the paper.

The layout is neat and the formulas are aligned.

It's still the same familiar approach.

Like a roaring industrial bulldozer, it crushed the winding geometric maze into a straight asphalt road. Chen Zhuo finished writing the last number.

He pressed the button on the mechanical pencil, put away the lead, and placed it on the table.

Then he stood up.

The chair legs scraped against the ground, making a soft sound.

Zhang Bai and Mo Xiaoyu subconsciously looked up at him.

They've only gotten halfway through solving the problem.

Chen Zhuo ignored the stares of others.

He picked up the exam paper and walked to the end of the long table.

Coach Xu was reading a thick mathematics journal when he heard the noise and looked up.

Chen Zhuo placed the test paper flat in front of Coach Xu.

"Teacher, I've finished today's test."

Chen Zhuo's voice was not loud, and it sounded very calm in the quiet seminar room.

"I'm going to the library to look up some information."

Coach Xu was taken aback.

He glanced down at his watch.

It had only been a little over an hour.

Coach Xu's gaze fell on Chen Zhuo's test paper.

He saw the rows of matrices and determinants in the solution area for the last question.

Coach Xu's eye twitched slightly.

He picked up the stainless steel thermos beside him, unscrewed the lid, blew on the tea leaves floating on top, and took a sip of water.

"Go ahead, come back for the meeting at 2:30 this afternoon."

Chen Zhuo nodded, turned around and walked out of the seminar room.

The door closed gently.

The room fell silent once more.

Zhang Bai looked at Chen Zhuo's empty seat, his fingers tightening slightly as he gripped the pencil, and then looked down at his own draft paper filled with auxiliary lines.

Suddenly, I felt that the lines were a bit messy.

I walked out of the administration building.

The heat wave outside instantly enveloped my entire body.

Chen Zhuo walked along the tree-lined path deeper into the campus.

The campus of the provincial experimental school is very large and the landscaping is very well done.

Because it was summer vacation, there were hardly any people on the streets.

Following the direction Lin Yi had pointed out earlier, Chen Zhuo arrived in front of a building with a red brick exterior.

library.

Pushing open the heavy glass door, the cold air from the central air conditioning rushed in.

The first floor is a regular reading room, with several rows of wooden bookshelves displaying various magazines and newspapers.

Chen Zhu greeted the administrator he had met with Lin Yi a couple of days ago and went straight up the stairs to the third floor.

The third floor is very spacious.

There is a relatively independent area at the very back.

Several rows of tall metal bookshelves were covered with a thin layer of dust.

The lighting here is a bit dim.

Chen Zhuo walked to the bookshelf.

My gaze swept across the rows of thick book spines.

The covers of these books are mostly dark blue or dark red, without any fancy designs, only gold-stamped lettering.

His fingers stopped on the spine of a thick book.

Pull it out.

It stirred up some dust, which then danced in the air.

The pages are somewhat yellowed.

The cover has a few simple English words printed on it.

Abstract Algebra.

Chen Zhuo took the book and walked to a corner by the window.

There was a row of old, folding leather sofas.

Sunlight streamed through the gaps in the leaves outside the window, casting dappled shadows on the sofa.

Chen Zhuo sat down and opened the table of contents of the book.

He leaned back on the sofa, one leg crossed over the knee of the other.

Occasionally, as he turned a page, his fingertips would get a bit of dust from the old book, which he casually wiped on his trouser leg.

He didn't watch it quickly.

Even for someone like him now, it takes time to learn and digest such advanced pure mathematical theories.

In Zeyang, he simply couldn't find original textbooks of this level.

The bookstores there only sell educational materials, and the city library only has old books translated in the 1980s.

He's like a dry sponge that's been thrown into a pool of water.

He needs these underlying logical frameworks.

He knew what he was going to do in the future.

Apart from going to the teaching and research office in the afternoon for the group meeting.

An afternoon.

Chen Zhuo sat in that corner.

Occasionally, I would turn a page.

It was so quiet that it seemed to blend in with the old, tin bookshelves.

the next day.

The air conditioning in the seminar room was still running at full blast.

Try curling my hair.

Today's questions are more difficult than yesterday's, and involve more calculations.

Zhang Bai is in exceptionally good form today.

He encountered a geometry problem with a similar model that he had seen in some internal documents.

He excitedly drew on the draft paper.

The auxiliary line was found extremely accurately.

Following this line, the entire complex geometry is cleverly dissected.

He rigorously proved it step by step using pure Euclidean geometry theorems.

After writing the last word, Zhang Bai let out a long sigh of relief.

He glanced at his watch: two hours and ten minutes.

This is a speed that he can be proud of.

He stood up, picked up the test paper, and walked towards Coach Xu.

When he handed in his paper, he inevitably caught a glimpse of a test paper already placed on the podium.

That belongs to Chen Zhuo.

He had left the seminar room half an hour earlier.

Zhang Bai's gaze lingered on the most challenging question on the exam paper for two seconds.

There are no auxiliary lines.

There is no sophisticated geometric cutting.

There is only a coordinate system and rows of cold matrix transformations.

All geometric variables were crudely converted into numbers.

Chen Zhuo used pure computational power to turn this geometry problem, which required extremely high talent and intuition to find a breakthrough, into a simple arithmetic problem.

Zhang Bai looked at the neatly arranged formulas.

He suddenly felt a sense of powerlessness from the inside out.

His prized artworks appear both cumbersome and fragile in the face of Chen Zhuo's irrational, industrial-grade flat-push approach.

That's a kind of dimensional reduction attack.

Zhang Bai silently placed his exam paper under Chen Zhuo's.

He turned around and walked back to his seat.

He did not take out the materials to review again.

Instead, he took out a blank sheet of draft paper and began to recall the steps for reducing the order of a matrix that he had just seen on Chen Zhuo's exam paper.

Break time.

Coach Xu took his water bottle and went outside.

Only a few of them remained in the seminar room.

Zhang Bai took the draft paper, stood up, hesitated for a moment, and walked to Chen Zhuo's seat.

Chen Zhuo was leaning back in his chair, resting with his eyes closed, fiddling with an eraser in one hand.

"that.."

Zhang Bai's voice was somewhat hoarse.

Chen Zhuo stopped what he was doing and looked up.

Zhang Bai placed the draft paper in front of Chen Zhuo.

Above is half of the matrix formula that he wrote down from memory.

"In the third step of your test paper, how did you immediately spot the sign when calculating the order of the determinant of the normal vector?"

Zhang Bai spoke in a very low voice.

"If I use the traditional method to push this surface, I need to find at least two vertical auxiliary lines. But with your method, I'm stuck at the unfolding step." Zhou Kai and Lin Yi also looked over.

Li Nanbai and Mo Xiaoyu, who were standing nearby, stopped writing and listened quietly.

Chen Zhuo glanced at Zhang Bai's slightly tense shoulders and chuckled softly.

"Don't stand there." He hooked an empty chair next to him with his foot. "Sit down and talk."

Zhang Bai paused for a moment, then pulled over a chair and sat down.

Chen Zhuo picked up the mechanical pencil from the table and casually pulled Zhang Bai's draft paper between the two of them.

The pen tip landed on the paper.

"here."

Chen Zhuo drew a line in the second row of the determinant.

"When you expand according to the first row, the pattern of positive and negative signs alternates. Look at the algebraic cofactor of this element."

He quickly wrote down two second-order determinants next to him.

"There's no need to memorize it. When you're setting up the system, choose the vertex with the most edges and corners as the origin to ensure that a large number of coordinates are zero." Chen Zhuo drew a simple diagram on the draft paper and tapped the table lightly with his pen.

"The more zeros there are, the more this part will be eliminated when reducing the order, and the rest can be calculated mentally to get the result."

Zhang Bai stared at those few simple numbers.

The thin veil in my mind was instantly pierced.

The computational barrier that had been troubling him for over ten minutes simply vanished.

"Geometric compositions are indeed beautiful."

Chen Zhuo put down his pen, leaned back, and spoke casually.

"But the time limit in the exam room is fixed. If you can't find the auxiliary line that can break the deadlock within ten minutes, don't look for it anymore." He pointed to the coordinate system on the paper with his finger.

"Just build the system directly and calculate it. The teacher grading the paper doesn't care how clever your process is. He only cares about whether the final answer is correct. If you master this tool, you can save twenty minutes on the big questions."

Zhang Bai stood still.

Looking at the formulas on the draft paper.

He nodded and put the draft paper away.

Thanks.

"fine."